him empty-handed prompted a decision to delay a test until a second bomb core could be processed and made ready: at a hundred grams per day, the Chelyabinsk A reactor could breed enough plutonium in sixty days; allowing for processing, that would result in a second core in time for a test in late August. Kurchatov moved out to the test site, on the windy steppes in Kazakhstan about sixty miles northwest of the town of Semipalatinsk, in May 1949, the same month his scientists organized a drama theater at Sarov, as if they needed any more drama in their lives.
James Forrestal had been a boxer at Princeton; his flattened, twice-broken nose emphasized his wiry Irish aggressiveness. After Princeton he had made a fortune on Wall Street, married a Ziegfeld Follies girl turned
In the winter of 1948–1949, Forrestal succumbed to mental illness. The syndicated columnist Drew Pearson had begun attacking him viciously and personally with covert support from the big, loud American Legion commander and Truman fund-raiser, Louis Johnson, who meant to succeed him at the Department of Defense. Truman suspected him of supporting Republican Thomas Dewey in the tough presidential campaign Truman had just won. Ordinarily alert and decisive, Forrestal sank into depression. ‘Jim calls me ten times a day,” Truman complained to a naval aide in January, “to ask me to make decisions that are completely within his competence, and it's getting more burdensome all the time.” By the end of the month, Forrestal was becoming delusional, claiming that “Jewish or Zionist agents” were following him and that the FBI had “tapped my wires.” He told his friend William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice, “Bill, something awful is about to happen to me.”
Truman asked for Forrestal's resignation, which came on March 28. Forrestal's friend Ferdinand Eberstadt found him in his darkened and shuttered house that afternoon whispering of Communist, Zionist and White House conspiracy, floridly paranoid. Eberstadt bustled him off to Florida for a rest, but when vacationing Robert Lovett met his plane, joking about golfing, Forrestal told the Undersecretary of State, “Bob, they're after me.”
Forrestal's friends called in William Menninger of Kansas's famed Men-ninger Clinic, who diagnosed severe depression — “of the type,” a Navy doctor subsequently explained, “seen in operational fatigue during the war.” Forrestal was worn out with stress, including the stress of trying to hold himself together during the months of his cumulative breakdown. The Menninger Clinic had successfully treated hundreds of cases of combat fatigue during the war, but Forrestal's wife, Eberstadt, Menninger and the Navy doctor, Captain George Raines, decided to send the former Secretary of Defense to the US Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, where his mental illness would be deniable. Under Raines's care at Bethesda, early on the Sunday morning of May 22, 1949, after copying out half of Sophocles’ desolate poem “The Chorus from Ajax” as a valediction (“‘Woe, woe!’ will be the cry… ”), James Forrestal tied one end of his bathrobe sash to the radiator of the diet kitchen across the hall from his sixteenth-floor room, tied the other end around his neck, removed the screen from the window above the radiator and jumped. He hung by the sash long enough to claw the framework below the window. Then the sash gave way at the radiator and he fell to his death on a third-floor roof below.
Forrestal's suicide may have been idiosyncratic, but there was more than enough fatality left over from the war and threat thickening from postwar conflict to make Washington somber in the late 1940s and push its mood toward paranoia. Before the war, the MIT physicist Jerrold Zacharias would observe a few years later, “a lot of people did not regard [Communism] as the threat that it turned out to be. Russia was small, it was experimental, it was backward… I do not think any people who were backing it then knew that it would capture half the globe… ” Communism did not seem small and experimental in Washington in the decade after the war. It seemed an enlarging menace that backwardness only made more brutal. Twelve Western nations signed a document creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in early April 1949 to join together in defense against that menace, and two days after the signing, Truman said publicly for the first time that he would use the atomic bomb again if he had to. The Nationalist Chinese retreated to Formosa on May 8, leaving the vast Chinese mainland to a Communist revolutionary army that many believed the Soviets controlled. (Truman, David Lilienthal discovered at a meeting around that time, was more philosophical. “Well,” the President told the AEC chairman, “nothing can be done about China until things kind of settle down… The dragon is going to turn over and after that perhaps some advances can be made out of it.”) Dean Acheson remembered that his “own first-hand attempt to work out something in regard to Germany in May of 1949 added me to the list of those whose experience convinced them that so long as it appeared in Russian eyes that there were soft spots, those soft spots would be probed.”
Edward Teller reacted to the changing American perception of Soviet threat. After leaving Los Alamos, Teller had settled into a satisfying life at the University of Chicago. His wife Mici had borne him a second child, a daughter, in the summer of 1946 and he devoted more time to his family. He was contributing again to basic science, work deeper and more fulfilling than weapons research. “The years after Los Alamos,” his friend and colleague Eugene Wigner believed, “and until the renewal of his preoccupation with national security, were perhaps Teller's most fruitful years scientifically.” Teller taught, co-authored thirteen scientific papers, regularly visited Los Alamos to consult and wrote articles for the
But hardly anyone was listening. The Cold War was picking up momentum. Oppenheimer had found his way into the high councils of government; he was internationally famous, a household name. Fermi kidded Teller about the implications of his origins: “Edward-a how come-a the Hungarians have not-a invented anything?” A plaintive footnote in a 1948 Teller
Teller would not easily wrench himself away from his good life in Chicago. As late as July 1948 he could still write in the
That summer, Bradbury had decided that Los Alamos needed Teller's help. “Norris was rather diffident in his approach to the scientists who had left,” Ulam recalls. “He felt that they should recognize by themselves how important for the country and the world it was for them to come back. As a result, although he wanted to, he did not like to ask people like… Teller to visit. It was actually left to me, with his consent, to write such invitations… Thus, in a way I was instrumental in bringing Teller back to Los Alamos.” Oppenheimer would testify that he endorsed Teller's return to the lab, testimony Teller corroborated: “Oppenheimer had talked to me and encouraged me to go back to Los Alamos and help in the work there.” Teller wrote Bradbury at the end of the 1948 summer that he was “giving most serious consideration to this possibility — The main reason that attracts me is the great
